Amazon.com: National Velvet (9780899663593): Enid Bagnold: Books National Velvet Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Next Special Offers and Product Promotions Editorial Reviews Review "A story which is at once breathlessly exciting and a delightful character study." ---"London Times"Put on your not-to-be-missed list." ---"The New Yorker"Some books are to be gobbled at a sitting. This is one." ---"Atlantic"The book is one that horse lovers of every age cannot fail to enjoy." ---"The New York Times --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition. Read more About the Author Enid Bagnold, who died in 1981, is best know for National Velvet and for her play The Chalk Garden, both of which were made into movies. Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App .

New York Times best sellers Browse the New York Times best sellers in popular categories like Fiction, Nonfiction, Picture Books and more. See more Product Details Publisher: Buccaneer Books (June 1, 1981) Language: English Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces See all verified purchase reviews Top Customer Reviews By Pat Wagner on November 11, 2014 Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase I don't believe the book I received was a first edition. It shows a renewed copyright date of 1963. First copyright was 1935. This book is interesting in that it is difficult at times to understand. Dialogue is colloquialistic of the time and place and almost a foreign language to today's reader. I vaguely remember the original movie, but didn't realize that it was so loosely based on the book. The main character in the book is described as homely, but they chose a beauty like young Elisabeth Taylor to play her part in the movie! The family runs a slaughter house in the book. Was that in the movie?

I'm going to watch the movie again after reading the book just for fun to see how different it is. I would say for a kid to read this book today, they would understand very little that the people were saying or describing. By Karen W. Miller on June 4, 2015 I read this story way back in the 9th grade because they gave us a list of books to make a report from and this was the only one I hadn't read. I love, love, love to read, and I have to say, I hate, hate, hated this book. No one in the book is pleasant; the little brother is disgusting, the mother--ugh. I just couldn't stand it, and I could never figure out why they would want to make a movie out of it. My mother in law made me watch the movie a few years back because it was her favorite. Perhaps she liked it because she never read the book, because the only thing the book and the movie had in common was a girl named Velvet and a horse. I really need to read it again as an adult.

I can honestly say this is the only book I ever truly hated in my whole life, so I suppose I should check back in on it and see if my world view has changed. In the mean time, read a good horse book like Black Beauty. Sad, but beautiful, and with a happy ending. National Velvet Book Review What parents need to know Educational value National Velvet teaches readers about country life in 1920s England, including gender roles, clothing, food and cooking, and child raising. There's also detailed information about horse care and riding, and horse behavior. Positive messages This classic novel sends a strong message that girls can achieve their goals, just like boys can. Another essential point is that personal achievement is its own reward. Positive role models Velvet's strong, quiet mother's own past achievement and her steadfast support set a strong example for her daughters. Velvet shows young girls the value of dedication, and the bond that can grow between a horse and a sensitive caretaker. Violence Port and some kind of peppermint spirits are taken medicinally. Parents Need to Know Parents need to know that Enid Bagnold's classic novel National Velvet stands with Anna Sewell's Black Beauty as one of the great books for horse lovers.

The story of scrawny, 14-year-old Velvet Brown and her equestrian triumphs inspires young horse riders, and offers an intimate view of family life in rural 1920s Sussex, England. Note that a man commits suicide within earshot (but not view) of a teen girl. There are also suspenseful scenes where adults fear that a child has been injured. A small amount of alcohol is consumed (for medicinal purposes), and a teen couple kiss. National Velvet was adapted to a popular film starring Elizabeth Taylor in 1944. The movie takes some liberties with the plot and characters; for exmple, the Velvet of the novel is thin and homely, whereas in the film, she's Elizabeth Taylor. However, the movie captures the spirit of the novel, and both it and the book are highly enjoyable and moving. User reviews Review this title! What's the story? NATIONAL VELVET, by Enid Bagnold, tells the story of thin, sickly 14-year-old Velvet Brown and how she beats the odds to become an internationally regarded horsewoman. Velvet is a dreamer whose love of horses occupies her waking and sleeping thoughts.

Her three older sisters also love horses, but their father, a butcher, can't afford to own animals that don't earn their keep. Mr. Brown's patience is tested when Velvet -- in a couple of surprising ways -- comes to possess several horses that once belonged to neighbors. Velvet's mother, however, was a great sportswoman in her younger days and is quietly supportive of Velvet's dreams. So, Mrs. Brown is taken into Velvet's confidence when the girl and her father's assistant, Mi (short for Michael), come up with a plan to give a fiery horse its chance to shine in the world's greatest steeplechase, the Grand National. Is it any good? QUALITY Enid Bagnold's National Velvet is written in a somewhat unusual way; frequent shorthand dialogue conveys the intimacy of a close-knit family, but could be difficult to follow for very young readers. However, Velvet's miraculous story is suspenseful and inspiring, and will be especially entertaining to horse lovers. Velvet's older sisters are very well-drawn at their different stages of maturity, and the youngest of the Brown children, preschool-age Donald, is an adorable, enfuriating toddler, who adds comic relief.

This is an entertaining, motivational novel about a young girl's great love for horses, and the way she challenges widely held gender prejudice. Families can talk about... Familes can talk about how National Velvet compares with more modern horse books you may have read. What would be different about the plot if the book were written now? Check out the film version of National Velvet. Which do you like better? How are the book and film different? How is Velvet like her mother, and how is she different? Book details Margaret Drabble on playwright Enid Bagnold | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Enid Bagnold began life as a rebel, and ended it as the lady of the manor. She moved from Chelsea and Bohemia to the butler and the garden trug. Virginia Woolf described her as "a scallywag who married a very rich man", which seems to sum up her dilemma in a nutshell - but perhaps too small a nutshell.

She had to make shifts, Woolf said, "from self to self", and it was these uneasy transitions which inspired much of her best writing, and which provide the staccato wit of her most successful play, The Chalk Garden, about to be revived at the Donmar Theatre. She wrote on the cusp, and provoked considerable unease. Was she old-fashioned or avant-garde? It was hard to tell. Woolf was jealous of her, frightened of her, and at times contemptuous of her. She did not know how to place her, and literary history has been equally uncertain. Bagnold was, in her youth, an authentic New Woman of dash and style and speed, determined to carve out her own career as a writer. She was born in 1889 into a military family, and as a child lived for some years in Jamaica, where she enjoyed much freedom and learned to ride, a passion which was to inspire her bestselling novel, National Velvet, published in 1935 - a book which Woolf suspected was "meretricious", and which was not representative of the rest of Bagnold's oeuvre.

Back in England, she went to a progressive school run by Aldous Huxley's mother, from which she graduated to a Chelsea flat, where she met artists, sat for Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and studied drawing with Walter Sickert. She followed closely, too closely, in the footsteps of HG Wells's New Woman, Ann Veronica. Ann Veronica had appeared in 1909, when Bagnold was 20. She studied her, overtook her, and plunged boldly onward. Wells's heroine (based on his mistress Amber Reeves) claimed independence from her suburban family, lived adventurously, and hovered on the threshold of being seduced by a middle-aged womaniser in a private room in a Soho restaurant: Bagnold crossed that threshold and was seduced. Her first lover was the notorious Frank Harris, editor, conman and self-acclaimed Casanova. She was introduced to him in 1912 in a bookshop off Charing Cross Road, where her first reaction to him was "Could it be Lord Kitchener cut off at the legs? No. It was Frank Harris." She promptly accepted a "shaming and fascinating" lunch with him at the Savoy.

He told her that sex was "the gateway to life" and, in her own words, she went through that gateway "in an upper room of the Café Royal". He was 56 and she was 22. What on earth did she see in this fat, short, dapper, ageing disreputable cad? She saw "pluck" and energy and wit, and the charm that intermittently charmed and infuriated Wells and Shaw and Arnold Bennett. "He made sin seem glorious." She worked for him for a while as assistant editor on one of his magazines, stood by him while he went briefly to prison, and then moved on, from café society to high society, to an affair with (among others) the suave Romanian Prince Antoine Bibesco, to friendships with Lady Diana Cooper and Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West, and, in 1920, to a lasting marriage with the wealthy head of Reuters, Sir Roderick Jones. She had a busy life.

The Joneses settled in Rottingdean on the south coast, in a house that had belonged to Edward Burne-Jones, and there Enid presided over a household that eventually consisted of "four children, Cutmore, nine indoor servants, two nurses and a nurserymaid, a chauffeur, two gardeners, a groom and a strapper". She also ran a Lutyens-decorated London home in Hyde Park Gate, where she gave grand parties. Woolf complained that Bagnold complained about not having time to write because of having to organise servants and dinner parties, but write she did, and she went on writing well into old age, using her domestic material in a highly stylised manner. She published several novels, of which the best is probably The Squire, published in 1938, and eight of her plays were performed, not all successfully. Her opinionated Autobiography, published in 1969, records her fights with theatre managements and casting directors.

Her friend Vita's son Nigel Nicolson remembered that "she involved herself intensively (too intensively for many of the actors and directors) in the production of all her plays", but her view was that if she did not involve herself, nothing happened. She was a controller, a manager, but she paid a price for her control, which is reflected in the themes of her work. (She also liked to control her history: it is a pity that she refused to talk to Frank Harris's biographer, Philippa Pullar, in the 1970s, believing that her own gnomic account of this affair was all the world needed to know.) She was encouraged in her career as a dramatist by the relatively easy ride of her first play, Lottie Dundass, published in 1941, and performed to acclaim in America and (with Sybil Thorndike) in 1943 in England: this is a strange melodrama about ambition, featuring a stage-struck shorthand typist who is willing to kill in order to succeed as an actress. It did well, but Bagnold nevertheless had to fight hard for The Chalk Garden, which was to be her most lasting success.

She noted that "The Chalk Garden was refused in London over a weekend", by Binkie Beaumont of HM Tennent. "It had taken me four years to write: and a fifth in battle with my New York manager, Irene Selznick. Fury, exhaustion, crossings of the Atlantic ..." But eventually it was put on in New York in 1955, with Siobhan McKenna and Gladys Cooper, and a set by Cecil Beaton. Bagnold observed that, before the first reading, Gladys Cooper called her Enid, after it, Miss Bagnold, and later on, Lady Jones. "As I ascended in social position and went down in contempt I realised she had classed me as a social character who by luck (and possibly ghosted) had got some fool to put on my play." But all ended well, with a Broadway triumph, quickly followed by a change of heart from Binkie Beaumont and a production at the Haymarket with Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, directed by John Gielgud. Bagnold's play has provided strong parts for actresses of character: subsequent productions have starred Dulcie Gray, Eleanor Bron, Helena Bonham Carter and Dorothy Tutin.

The play is witty, aphoristic, eccentric: it was acclaimed by Kenneth Tynan in the Observer as a vindication of the West End, as "the finest artificial comedy to have flowed from an English (as opposed to an Irish) pen since the death of Congreve ... We eavesdrop on a group of thoroughbred minds, expressing themselves in speech of an exquisite candour, building ornamental bridges of metaphor, tiptoeing across frail causeways of simile ..." This was in 1956, the year of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Eight years later, in 1964, Osborne's then wife Penelope Gilliatt was writing in the same newspaper: "People behave now as if ... the battle over the garden-trug kind of play had long ago been won and forgotten. But I am not sure they are right ...

James Saunders's A Scent of Flowers seems to me to lie bang in the tradition; it is irredeemably mandarin and precious and takes us right back to The Chalk Garden." The times were changing, fast, and the ageing Bagnold expressed her irritation at always being asked to explain herself: Pinter and Beckett didn't explain themselves, so why should she? She had as much right to be mysterious as they. It will be interesting to see how the play performs in 2008. It is a curious piece, adumbrating themes to be found in several of Bagnold's works - most notably the tension between servant and master, and the Freudian subplots that haunt apparently conventional households. (There is a touch in this of her contemporary Ivy Compton-Burnett, not herself a dramatist, but whose novels have been successfully adapted for stage and radio.) This tension was very much of the period of Bagnold and Compton-Burnett and Woolf's youth.

Alison Light's recent excellent account of domestic service, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, explores the infrastructure that supported Bloomsbury, and the equivocal but important role of cook Nellie Boxall in Woolf's emotional life - Woolf was notoriously unable to deal successfully with this subject matter in her fiction, although she wrote about it at length in letters and diaries, as she wrote about women's rights in her journalism. In Bagnold, we find these conflicts at once magnified and stylised. The butler, that archetypal and often mute prop of the West End stage, becomes in her work a figure of immense significance - a tyrant, a father figure, a confessor, an intimate. So, too, does the companion-governess and (in The Squire) the midwife. Interviewing servants was one of the most stressful duties of the manager of a large household, and The Chalk Garden exploits the latent drama of the situation in a manner since further explored by Alan Sugar. The play opens as Mrs St Maugham seeks a minder for her fierce and wilful 16-year-old granddaughter Laurel, and we follow the consequences of her choice of the mysterious Miss Madrigal.

Bagnold herself appears to have made some disastrous appointments, if the hints from her work are to be believed: Cutmore, who served the Joneses for 29 years, was one of the few who stayed. Others drank, or worse, and were replaced through frequent and exhausting visits to the "Registry Offices". And those who stayed on acquired power. Upstairs, throughout this play, the old monster Pinkbell, who never understood how to grow plants on chalk, lies dying. He is the butler in the attic, more sinister than the jovial seducer Frank Harris in that upper room. His unseen presence looms. No wonder Bagnold complained to Woolf that she found it hard to find time to write. She had to defend her time not like modern mothers from her children, but from her staff. Her children were her friends. Bagnold liked children and wrote exceptionally well about them.

National Velvet, dedicated to her husband and her daughter Laurian, is not only a fairy story, in which a 14-year-old pony-mad girl wins the Grand National on a horse bought in a raffle, but a keenly observed portrait of a large and lively family - we note that Velvet is, and convincingly, not a squire's but a butcher's daughter, a bold narrative choice. (This book is still doing well: HarperCollins now markets it as a "Charming Classic", its jacket adorned with a keepsake pony charm on a gold chain - but, oddly, no copyright line.) The Squire is an even more remarkable piece. Imagine To the Lighthouse written by Mrs Ramsay expecting her fifth child, and you get something of the spirit of this intense and passionate novel, which is unlike anything else ever written about pregnancy. This is maternity and childbirth 20 years before Sylvia Plath.

The eponymous "squire", whose husband is abroad on business, happily awaits the arrival of the Unborn in a country house; sensuous descriptions of her own body, her garden, her greed for food and port wine, and her sharply differentiated children merge with her thoughts about the new baby, about middle age and pain, about her quarrelling staff, and about the waning of the sexual imperative. The arrival of the midwife, an old and tested friend and a dedicated professional, initiates some extraordinary conversations about babies, gender, vocation and the maternal impulse. The relationship of these two women, as they go through one of the most ordinary yet astonishing rituals of life, is portrayed with a tender affectionate care and a deep respect. This is a very surprising book for its time, for any time. So Bagnold was more than a scallywag who married a rich man. She was a pioneer rather than an anachronism. The new production of The Chalk Garden, with its three strong women, will give us a timely opportunity to reconsider her talents. It is not a play about a butler and a garden trug.

· The Chalk Garden is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2, from June 5 to August 2. To book, call 0870 060 6624 or go to donmarwarehouse.com National Velvet: Books | eBay National Velvet Up for your consideration is a New DVD of "National Velvet". Condition: Buy It Now Free Shipping Staring: Mickey Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Bean, David Thewlis, Donald Crisp. Title: National Velvet & Story of & Black Beauty DVD Region 1 US Import NTSC. Format: DVD, Closed-captioned. Region Co... Buy It Now Free Shipping National Velvet A Novel by Enid Bagnold Hardcover used copy, 303 pages. Dust jacket has some tears and wrinkling. No writing or underlining. Thank you for looking. Buy It Now or Best Offer Thunderhead by Mary O'Hara - 1st, HC. The Black Stallion Revolts by Walter Farley - HC, 1st Stated. National Velvet Illustrated by Enid Bagnold Jones - HCDJ, 1963. Lot Of 3 Horse Books. I am currently...

Buy It Now Free Shipping Actor : Donald Crisp, Angela Lansbury, Mickey Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor. National Velvet. Title : National Velvet. Studio : Warner Home Video. New DVDs and Blu-rays are in shrink wrap and will have an ... | 53 sold Untitled DocumentTitle: National Velvet DVD 1944 Region 1 US Import NTSC Region Code: 1 Discs: 1 Format: DVD, Closed-captioned Languages: English,French Subtitles: English,French, Audio: Dolby Digital... $3.99 Buy It Now Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney star in this 1945 classic tale about a young girl who enters her horse into the Grand National Steeplechase possibly the greatest horse race of all time. Buy It Now or Best Offer National Velvet (DVD, 2000). Don't miss out on this nice DVD. Double your traffic. I HAVE A LARGE SELECTION OF NEW AND USED GAMES DVDs CDs BOOKS SOFTWARE PROGRAMS SPORTS CARDS AND MORE STUFF ! Buy It Now Free Shipping National Velvet (DVD, 2000). We only deal with well cared for merchandise. We only deal with authentic product!

No bootleg, copies, or counterfeits! Buy It Now Free Shipping It is very much appreciated! We will work to correct any issue you may have. YOU ARE PROTECTED !! Buy It Now Free Shipping REGION 1 (U.S. and Canada only). While we endeavour to keep the information correct, we make no warranties of any kind about the accuracy. Optional Subtitles. $3.99 Buy It Now THE INCREDIBLE MR. LIMPET A mild-mannered bookkeeper who longs to serve his country gets his wish ?. when he turns into a fish ?. and becomes the U.S. Navy’s new secret weapon. Don Knotts plays one of... Laurian, Comtesse d'Harcourt - the original National Velvet girl - Telegraph Film Laurian, Comtesse d'Harcourt - the original National Velvet girl The inspiration for the classic film 'National Velvet’ gives her verdict on Elizabeth Taylor – and great-niece Samantha Cameron – and shares her memories of growing up in high society.

Elizabeth Taylor played Velvet Brown in 'National Velvet', the film inspired by Laurian, Comtesse d'Harcourt Photo: Everett Collection / Rex Features Comments Her bearing and dress, before even she utters a word, mark out Laurian, Comtesse d’Harcourt, as an English woman of a certain era. The clothes are smart, but practicality, not style, is the consideration: a good tweed skirt, white shirt, ankle socks and sensible shoes, her thick white hair is cropped short, framing a weathered but lovely face. Now 90 years old, she stands strong and tall, leaning only slightly on the stick that she clearly disdains (a horse rolled on her and smashed her hip some 20 years ago). And, in her questioning smile and faded blue eyes, there is still a glimpse of the spirited teenager who inspired National Velvet, the best-selling novel that has never been out of print since its publication in 1935. Despite more than 40 years living in the French countryside, where she breeds Welsh ponies, she speaks with the precision, charm and absolute confidence of the British upper classes.

Indeed, Samantha Cameron’s great-aunt lives up to every expectation one might have, given her lofty connections. Her father, Sir Roderick Jones, chairman of Reuters, and his wife, the feisty Lady Enid, an acclaimed novelist and playwright were, for decades, the pivot around which London’s literati and glitterati swanned. Laurian’s godfather was Rudyard Kipling, and her first husband was heir to a peerage and a Telegraph war reporter. Her second was a French count, Pierre d’Harcourt, a hero of the Resistance who had survived Buchenwald. Laurian is both loyal and discreet about her brother Timothy’s daughter, Annabel, Viscountess Astor and granddaughter Samantha. '’She’s wonderful. Absolutely charming,’’ is her only comment on Mrs Cameron, but she confesses to being a dedicated observer of Coalition politics. “I think he’s [David Cameron] definitely a good thing, don’t you?” she says. Related Articles Harry Potter film sets: too close to the magic?

20 Dec 2011 But I’m not here to talk about the Camerons, nor about Boris Johnson (she’s a fan of London’s Mayor) and his “naughty sister” Rachel, nor the latest gossip in The Spectator or the current issue of The Lady, both treasured weekly links to the country of her birth. I have come to Brenne National Park, some 270km south of Paris, to interview the Comtesse d’Harcourt in her own right as the “real’’ Velvet Brown. When Elizabeth Taylor died in March this year, no obituary failed to mention the 1944 box-office hit that had launched her career. National Velvet was a film that led both critics and movie-goers the world over to fall for an exquisite, violet-eyed 12-year-old whose life would be conducted from that point on in the light of flash bulbs and shadow of headlines. Earlier this month, Taylor’s own copy of the script, bound in violet leather, was sold for £110,000 at Christie’s in New York during the auction of the star’s jewels, art, clothes and memorabilia.

That script tells the story of a young girl, Velvet Brown, who rides an unprepossessing piebald horse she’d won in a raffle, The Pie, to victory in the Grand National. Taylor later spoke of how she fought for the role, consuming vast meals and willing herself to grow so the director’s concerns about her puny physique could be assuaged. She once described it as the “most exciting film” she ever made. It was Laurian’s mother who, as Enid Bagnold, wrote the book on which the film was based and her pony-mad daughter, then 14 , was both the inspiration and the artist responsible for the distinctive equine line drawings that graced its pages. “Yes, I had such a passion for horses,’’ says Laurian. “I was able to practise my riding so much because I had a governess and a lot of time.’’ She also had McHardy, a former jockey with a mysterious past, who was employed by the Joneses to teach Laurian and her three younger brothers to ride.

He slept, by choice, in a loose box and, according to Bagnold, invented the Joneses as a “horsebox family”, as they toured gymkhanas countrywide. She once claimed that for the 10 years McHardy was with the family he was “more important than a governess: more important than a mother”. It was his racing background that informed the book’s narrative and his character, Mi Taylor, was played by Mickey Rooney in the film. I read the book long before I saw the film. I still have my dishevelled paperback copy, its pages yellowing and marked by the graffiti of my pathetic attempts to emulate those drawings. Laurian laughs when I tell her this. She is bemused by interest in what happened so long ago. “I became so proud of myself and the drawings. I used to graciously leave them about just in case anyone should want to look at them.

I got paid for them – £100 each – such a lot of money then, but it came in handy for the ponies.’’ Laurian was in her early twenties when the film version of National Velvet came out and much preoccupied with her war work as an inspector of parts at an aircraft manufacturer in north London. She was, she says, unimpressed by Taylor’s “seat’’ when she saw the film. '’I really didn’t think much of the way she rode – it was a shame. She rode so badly.’’ Her observation is telling. The falls that Taylor took during filming were the cause of back problems that plagued her in later life and led to a dependency on painkilling drugs. For Laurian, the Velvet era is but a fleeting period in a rich life that has encompassed so much, including her own career as writer, artist and horse breeder, and so many people of note. Her parents hosted the celebrities of the day, the mavericks and movers, artists, authors, politicians and actors, at their home at Hyde Park Gate.

During the summer, the family decamped to North End House, a sprawling complex of buildings and stables in the West Sussex village of Rottingdean, where adults and children could indulge their love of riding, and where the high-octane entertaining continued. Bagnold described it as “a wet and windy village, full of rheumatism and beauty with a history of great men”. The great men included the artists Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward John Poynter and Laurian’s godfather, Rudyard Kipling, who decreed that her birth must be marked by the purchase of a bull dog. A bitch called Mary soon joined the household menagerie. Kipling later redeemed himself somewhat by giving her a necklace of real pearls, but, says Laurian, her mother was never a fan. The great storyteller and poet of Empire, the man who penned the nation’s favourite poem If, was, in Bagnold’s view, a “bit of a bore’’. “He had so long ago made up his mind and went always on the old trail. He had nothing new to say. That was what was so extraordinary…’’ she wrote in her memoir.

The names of others who were regular visitors to Rottingdean pepper Laurian’s conversation: Harold (Macmillan), Vita (Sackville-West), Nancy (Astor) Diana (Cooper), part of the long roll-call of those who featured in the vibrant social life, nurtured by the ambitious Bagnold, in the little seaside town. And Hollywood came calling, too. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton visited in the late Sixties to pay their respects to Bagnold. “Mummy didn’t meet her during the war,’’ Laurian says. “Later, she and Richard came to Rottingdean to show thanks for National Velvet. I don’t think my mother was too impressed. She was too made up and wearing fur – and that diamond…’’ she says laughing. She is too polite to say what she means but the stone’s vulgarity – most likely the 33.29 carat “Elizabeth Taylor” diamond, given to her by Burton – is implied. Burton, however, was a hit with them all. “He told wonderful stories about his father, who was a miner in Wales. He was completely wonderful to my daughter, Hattie, who was about 12 then.

She’s never forgotten him.’’ Hattie (Harriet) is one of Laurian’s two children – she also has a son, Thierry – by Comte Pierre d’Harcourt. In 1952, Laurian had married the Hon Rowland Winn who had reported on the Spanish civil war for The Daily Telegraph. Her parents were ecstatic at the match. Winn, the son of the 3rd Baron St Oswald, was heir to Nostell Priory and 300 acres of parkland in West Yorkshire. But, by the time the engagement was announced, she had fallen for Pierre, a married man. He attended her wedding and, in a poignant gesture of regret, had tossed a bouquet of white flowers into the bridal car. The marriage to Winn lasted just three years and, once divorced, she and Pierre were united. Today Laurian lives alone – her husband died in 1981 – in a pretty, rambling farmhouse, surrounded by forests and lakes, that smells of woodsmoke, dogs and horses. It is filled with the detritus of decades with which she cannot bear to part.

Each room is part museum, part store room but very much a home, bursting with dusty photographs, paintings, newspaper cuttings, theatre programmes from her mother’s opening nights in the West End and on Broadway, faded rosettes and tarnished cups from bygone gymkhanas, displays of riding whips, baskets of old halters and stacks of champagne crates, the bottles of Veuve Cliquot they held drunk long ago. The trap that her mother drove around Rottingdean during the war, when petrol was rationed, stands in one of the outhouses, sad and thick with grime. On the wall in one long cobwebby corridor hangs a coat, dulled brass buttons and tattered cream silk facings, embroidered with the words, “Roderick Jones, MFH, Master of the Cape Hunt, 1912-1915’’. The past is very much part of Laurian, Comtesse d’Harcourt’s present as she works on her memoir, but she is not lost in it. Her son and daughter and their families are regular visitors, and the girlish passion for horses that gave birth to National Velvet, endures.

She drives me to the railway station at Châteauroux in her mud-spattered little car, bids me farewell and speeds off – down the centre of the road because ''it is much safer when you come to a bend’’ – back to the farm to fill water buckets, distribute pony nuts to her brood in the fields and check up on the mare about to foal. “I started National Velvet as a study into a girl’s relationship with her pony,’’ Bagnold once wrote. “But it turned immediately and by itself into a story.’’ The story continues. Start your free 30 day Amazon Prime trial» National Velvet | book word The Squire by Enid Bagnold Enid Bagnold wrote National Velvet, right? That quintessential book of adolescent horse-mad girl, and young Elizabeth Taylor. She also wrote The Squire, first published in 1938 and republished in 2013 by Persephone Books in their trademark grey covers. The glorious endpapers for this book are Magnolia, a design for cotton and rayon from 1936. The Squire is curious title.

It jars our class-consciousness, being more associated with the beery form of address, as in ‘Same again Squire?’ And it jars with the feminist consciousness of language, including titles. In Enid Bagnold’s novel the Squire is the main character, a woman who is managing a large household, the manor house set in a rural village beside the sea. She who had once been thirsty and gay, square-shouldered, fair and military, strutting about life for spoil, was thickened now, vigorous, leonine, occupied with her house, her nursery, her servants, her knot of human lives, antagonistic or loving. Twelve years married to a Bombay merchant and nearly five times a mother, she was well accustomed to her husband’s long absences, and to her own supreme command. (p11) She has seven staff in the house, two in the kitchen, four children and the birth of her fifth child is imminent. The story unfolds gently. We observe the Squire as she passes through the days preceding, during and following her confinement, dealing with domestic problems, finding a cook, managing the lazy butler, spending time with her four children, and conversing with her friend Caroline.

The main event is the arrival of the Midwife, a woman of strong opinions. The novel ends with the baby safely born, the Squire taking up the running of the household again after her confinement, the departure of the Midwife and the imminent return of the Squire’s husband. There is little plot. Events happen: the Squire has to deal with the departure of the cook, an intrusive window cleaner, her butler’s holiday and drunken replacement, her children and a weekly letter to her absent husband. The Squire manages all of this with serenity. Caroline, her friend from her more socialite past, is still interested in sex-love. She cannot believe that the Squire does not miss the wilder life of her younger days and the capricious attentions of men, but is content with her situation. The contrast between these two offers the strongest aspect of the novel. The Midwife and the Squire are more in tune. However, the firm ideas of the midwife about how birth should be organised inevitably produce difficulties. She would like to ‘palisade’ mothers, creating a secluded and calm environment, and a place for a newborn to emerge and form their character in the first days of life.

Eventually mother and newborn son are integrated into the teeming household. Enid Bagnold challenges the idea that the marriage is a woman’s destiny, the high point of her life, and towards which her youthful efforts should be expended. She suggests that maternity is just as much a satisfaction and a domain for women, but she is not suggesting that this is the fulfilment of women either. Much of the Squire’s ruminations are to do with the future, when the children no longer need her, and indeed what happens to them after her death. The women are competent at managing complex situations and supporting each other. A particular charm of this book are the portraits of two children; little odd-ball Boniface. He is not the normal rumbustious male child, and his quirky take on the world and delicate relationship with the Squire are delightful. Lucy is the only daughter, and she is both insightful and caring of others, especially of Boniface. The intimacy of Lucy and her mother is delicately drawn. … Lucy came in and hung over the writing table. ‘What are you doing?’ said the Squire dipping her pen in the ink. ‘Nothing.’

Question: Who wrote the children's book 'National Velvet'?
Answer: ENID BAGNOLD